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The
2003 Award
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The Bay of Angels by
Anita Brookner
Nominated by:
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Publisher of Nominated Edition: Penguin ISBN : 0140299254 |
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors. |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| Zoë
Cunningham is delighted when her widowed mother remarries, particularly
as her new stepfather is amiable, generous, and the owner of a villa in
Nice. Enchanted visits come to an abrupt end when an entirely unexpected
tragedy ensues. This in its turn is followed by a bewildering decline in
which both Zoë and Anne, her mother, are trapped. Surrounded by strangers, however well-meaning, both yearn for home, although that home appears ever more remote. They are forced to learn how and how not to trust appearances. A benign outcome, so often read about in the fairy stories of childhood, may in fact be possible, but only of one is willing to shed the illusions that those same stories did so much to encourage. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Anita Brookner was born in London, and apart from several years in Paris has lived there ever since. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. The Bay of Angels is her twentieth novel. |
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Reader
Review
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I think it has been said that Anita Brookner is a miniaturist, concentrating on small scale lives in which not much happens and so it is with "The Bay of Angels". Yet despite this or maybe because of it, the reader is drawn into this low key world of people who behave well, who do the right thing and try to cope with the trials of their world. This novel is essentially about a mother and daughter relationship. Beginning in the 1950s we meet Anne, the young widowed mother living with her young daughter Zoe. As Zoe moves into her mid to late teens, the mother remarries and moves to the South of France, as much to release her daughter to live her own life as to find security and protection in her new marriage. Themes explored include the values of the two generations, the now apparent freedom of one against the strictures and conventions of the earlier one, the values of community versus individual freedom and centrally, that life is fact not fiction with no happy ever after ending. This is a beautiful book, set mostly in Nice on the Bay of Angels, bitter sweet and full of insights about the human condition. A wonderful read and I highly recommend it. Raheny Library Reading Group Member |
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